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If there's one micro-genre I love in this world, it's the "mothers behaving badly," from Steel Magnolias to Hustlers. (To quote Jennifer Lopez as stripper and single mom Ramona Vega in the latter: "Motherhood is a mental illness.") I saw Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's film Tully in theaters six years ago, in which Charlize Theron plays a new mom so desperate for help that she hallucinated it in the form of Mackenzie Davis as a swingin' nighttime nanny. I was a nanny myself then, meaning I had a front-row seat to plenty of exhausted moms and their (mostly) minimally helpful husbands trying to raise their kids with occasional $20-per-hour assistance. And while I didn't yet have kids of my own, I learned that the smallest of humans can easily rob you of sleep, energy, and whatever other thin tether helps connect you to the outside world.

As I made the gradual switch from nanny to full-time journalist in my twenties, I never lost my interest in motherhood and childrearing, reading authors from Maggie Nelson to Alice Walker to Meaghan O'Connell to Michelle Tea about the uncanny bizarreness of creating another person from your own flesh and being expected to guide them for life. O'Connell describes her experience with postpartum depression during the first year of her older son's life in her 2018 memoir And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready. Before that chapter, though, she sums up the pain of labor with singularly evocative prose: "Here was the soul-crushing pain again, like a monster who had mercifully passed me by only to catch my scent and come thrashing back down the hallway to come find me in some closet."